“He was such a mess,” my mother sighed, shaking her head, “smoking marijuana, getting thrown in jail. But then, in jail, he became a Christian.” She beamed. “And now he is just the nicest, kindest, most gentle person in the world.”
I tried not to visibly wince and smiled wanly, saying nothing. My mother was doing it again. Laying the sugary icing on the conversion cake with a trowel, as born-agains are wont to do. I hadn’t been looking forward to this particular aspect of my parents’ Christmas visit.
To “born-again,” evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, the three modifiers I just used for clarification are superfluous. They are the only real, true Christians. When my mother says her friend “became a Christian,” it doesn’t mean he got confirmed by the Catholic Church. He didn’t join the Quakers or get baptized into Eastern Orthodoxy or start attending a Methodist church. No, he said a prayer, no doubt on his knees, to “accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior” — and then embarked upon a “relationship” with his New Best Friend by adopting a whole bunch of conflicting and sometimes outrageous dogmas as well as the unshakable certainty that the (Protestant) Bible, as the Word of God, is the inerrant source of all truth (including historic and scientific truth).
**
Conversion stories like these are offered up by “Christians” like my mother as evidence that their God is the only game in town, and that only accepting their version of Jesus can solve your major life problems. It’s a message I heard (and internalized) throughout my childhood, and even now, having had firsthand experience of the failures of such a belief system, I’m still at a loss for words.
“Testimonials in support of the faith,” notes missionary child Marlene Winell in her religious-recovery book Leaving the Fold, a book which saved my sanity, if not my soul, “are heard and recorded, whereas stories of failure go unnoticed.” (Only recently did I find out that the hallowed former pastor of my parents’ celebrated church had “nonbelievers” for children.) “Similarly,” Winell goes on, “reports of success with other belief systems may not be heard.”
Certainly within the yoga world I heard some miraculous redemption stories attributed to the power of yoga, or meditation, or a Hindu Swami by the name of Kaleshwar. My friend Natalie straightened out her chaotic life, apparently, with the help of all three.
This kind of selective perception proves useful in other areas as well:
An area of selection that is always interesting is the convenient use of “scientific evidence.” If it does not serve the fundamentalist belief system, as in the case of evolution, it is disregarded as “of man,” or worse yet, Satanic. But if it supports anything biblical, it is hailed as “proof.”
I remember excitedly watching, with my family, a Christian documentary about “evidence” of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, as well as reading articles in my parents’ Christian magazines about the Shroud of Turin. We found these “scientific discoveries” very gratifying.
It was that Satanic evolution taught in my “secular” biology classes, however, that became a major chink in the wall of my mighty fortress — a fortress that during my pluralistic public-schooled adolescence developed rapidly multiplying cracks.
**
My greatest objections with my parents’ faith are not about the ridiculously outmoded (scientific or historical) worldviews perpetuated by Biblical literalism. I don’t even identify myself as an atheist at this point. I did call myself an atheist before I studied philosophy, epistemology, and the history of science in more depth; after all that, I started identifying myself as an agnostic. (Now I’m just a yoga woo-woo wannabe.)
A tangent here: a friend of mine from the bookstore once gave me grief about not self-identifying as an atheist. She thought I was being cowardly and evading the question. I told her that I found the assertion that there is no God as hubristic as the assertion that there is one. The presumed omniscience of some scientific materialists is as baffling to me as the rock-hard certainty of some theists; they act as if there’s a kind of epistemological consensus among rational people that doesn’t really exist. The pure Skeptics question whether knowledge is even possible.
Here we are, after all, little nano-bits of nature ostensibly evolved from the primeval soup, yet we convince ourselves that the a priori categories we impose on nature with our evolved-out-of-nature brains can make definitive pronouncements about the nature which encompasses them…not to mention reality itself!
What’s more, given that the means we typically use to achieve scientific certainty is the controlled experiment (to prove or disprove a hypothesis), and that we can only experiment upon what we can control, i.e. that which is “inferior” to us (subject to our manipulations), anything “superior” to us (not subject to our manipulations) cannot be experimented upon this way. A Twilight-Zone-y example: imagine that we are, at this very moment, being watched by a highly evolved alien race that has the technology to cloak themselves against detection by our primitive instruments and senses. How would we ever know they’re there?
For that matter, how do we know we’re not “in the Matrix?!!!”
**
But enough with the sci-fi head-tripping. I’m not about to pick apart my parents’ version of Christianity with science or so-called objective reasoning. There are better people available for that (some of them are even non-literalist Christians, like John Shelby Spong). I stumbled across one such rationalist, actually, while seeking some fortification after my parents’ Christmas bombardment…
Okay, one more tangent: I am currently utterly infatuated with yet another younger man*, this one a delightful 27-year-old Kansan named Chris who goes by the handle of Evid3nc3 on YouTube. Chris, a graduate student in advanced computer science, has made a series of highly intelligent yet compassionately delivered videos about the gradual loss of his Christian faith. You can find the playlist for his wonderful series here.
After fifteen minutes of listening to Chris’s soothing, mellifluous voice and looking at his kind, easy-on-the-eyeballs face (not to mention being impressed by the generosity and openness it took to offer such an anti-testimony), I was ready to give it up, and not for Jesus. At any rate, his series is a terrific thing to watch if you’re a “fallen” born-again Christian seeking comfort and solidarity. It’s extremely well done, from the graphics to the music. I felt as if I were watching PBS at moments.
(*Before anyone goes labeling me a cougar, I would like to point out that I don’t go out of my way to pursue younger men. If Sam was young enough to be my son, Seamus was old enough to be my dad. “It’s not the years in a man’s life that count, but the life in his years.” Besides, can I help it if I’m such a MILF-lookin’ mama that nobody but twentysomethings have been hitting on me all year?)
**
Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to go into some of my greatest objections with what I was raised to believe. For starters, check out a batshit-crazy Bible passage like this one:
(Romans 9:18-23) Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?” But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath — prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory?
The picture the apostle Paul paints of God is one of a totalitarian asshole for whom some people are, entirely arbitrarily, more equal than others. This passage, among others, supports the whole Calvinist notion of a saved “elect,” predestined for glory, while the great sinful mass of humanity trundles off to hell. So much for “red and yellow, black and white…(being) precious in His sight.” Some people are wholly expendable. (It brings to my mind a yearbook byline written by one of the most incorrigible wags in my high school: “If ten innocent people died to save one human life, it would be worth it.”) Such theology informs the attitude I see on display when our religious and political leaders talk about Our Great Land as a Christian Nation founded by our Christian Fathers (never mind Jefferson), entitled to military and moral dominion over all the world. Naturally, we should be the exception to things like weapons bans, climate treaties, and inconvenient Geneva accords. (Just as members of evangelical power group “The Family” in D.C. have to be allowed different standards of marital fidelity and morality in general.)
Of course, I find the apostle Paul to have generally been a major asshole himself — but where I come from, you’d better not say that. Paul is just taking holy dictation from God.
Bruce Bawer, a “liberal” gay Episcopalian, who has written cogently and at length about what he calls “legalistic Christianity,” puts the noxiousness this way in Stealing Jesus:
…(T)he problem with legalistic Christianity is not simply that it affirms that God can be evil; it’s that it imagines a manifestly evil God and calls that evil good. In effect…it worships evil. In America right now, millions of children are taught by their legalistic Christian parents and ministers to revere a God of wrath and to take a sanguine view of human suffering. They are taught to view their fellow Americans not as having been “created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence would have it, but as being saved or unsaved, children of God or creatures of Satan; they are taught not to respect those most different from themselves but to regard them as the enemy, to resist their influence, and to seek to restrict their rights.
**
I am just now starting to unpack what it meant to grow up with a truly warped fundamentalist conception of “love” — but this, happily, also begins to explain why my mother’s loaded use of the word can arouse rage, as well as why I have had so much trouble “staying out of the circle” (respecting boundaries) in my romantic (or would-be romantic) relationships.
To be blunt, the “Christians” from whence I came are soupily sentimental — yet their beliefs demand an almost sociopathic withholding of empathy. With sensibilities seemingly derived from Hallmark or Thomas Kinkade, they love to imagine their soft-focus, handsome white Jesus cuddling fuzzy little lost lambs (oh how Jesus loves the little lost lambs!), but when it gets down to brass tacks, these folk neither spare the rod on their own little lambs nor bat an eye at the outright sadism and inhumanity of their capricious and abusive Old Testament “Father.” (I’m sure all those Midianite children deserved what they got.)
One has only to watch Rachel Maddow’s interview with born-again author Richard Cohen — the alleged “ex-gay” therapist (kicked out of the APA) whose book helped spur Uganda’s horrifying proposed death-penalty law — to witness the depth of sentimental “Christian” self-delusion at play. Cohen goes on and on about “loving” gay people, about “having compassion” for gay people, even “healing” them with his innovative (if questionable) hug therapy…but such blinkered and overstated sentimentality belies the bigoted and alarmist language in his book (gays are pedophiles who will recruit your kids!) that incites the kind of fear and hatred behind Uganda’s anything-but-warm-and-fuzzy legislation. (Don’t even get me started on that “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit.)
Then there’s the fundamental lack of respect for personal boundaries. In order to evangelize the “unsaved,” you have to continue to push and push them, to get all up “in their circle.” You’re supposed to be like God, after all, and God, as I’ve written before, is the Hound of Heaven who’ll hunt you down like a bloodhound whether you like it or not!
How shudderingly claustrophobic. As life coach Lisa Brown often says, a person pursued will run. We don’t like our boundaries invaded. My experience of both God and Family, as my inveterate readers know, was an invasive one; hence my flashes of seemingly inordinate rage when my mother coos about this sentimental but schizoid and suffocating “Christian” version of “love.” You and your soft-focus sociopath stay the fuck out of my circle, Ma!
Unfortunately, I also learned how to over-pursue. Sorry, guys. (I feel like writing one of those 12-Step-recovery “amends” letters to about half a dozen men from my past. But I doubt most of them want to hear from me.)
**
The perfectionism this belief system instills is also crazy-making. We “Christians” start out with some impossibly high expectations.
“When you feel disappointed,” Marlene Winell explains to those of us who grew up with reassurances of perfect bliss in Christ, “you are more likely to panic about having a bad life instead of a bad day.” This accurately describes the all-or-nothing thoughts that have often sent me spiraling into depression.
Lacking perfection, however, does not equal total failure.
…You were taught to think you needed life to be ideal. You were probably told that you had a void in your life that only God could fill, because only God could fill it perfectly. The implication was that you had to have your needs met perfectly. That is, only Jesus could truly understand you, and you needed to be understood completely. Only God could give you enough purpose in life, and you had to have a grand, compelling purpose.
Winell shares the experience of finally getting her emotional needs met by another human being in her first marriage. “The closeness with a real live person had a profound effect: it broke my addiction to God.” Likewise, for me, finally having a wholly pleasurable and fulfilling sexual relationship with Sam seemed to break my mother’s holy-perfectionist “curse”– No man will ever satisfy you. I could finally say she had been wrong.
This relentless “Christian” perfectionism extends not only to expectations about how life should be, but also to how we should behave and believe in order to make sure God is pleased and we’re doing everything right. (Otherwise we could lose our salvation, and wind up with the goats instead of the sheep.) Paul instructs us to be perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect…but I had a devil of a time trying to interpret all the conflicting messages in the Bible and determine whether or not it was even up to me, or to God’s grace. Predestination vs. free will, faith vs. works…what to think? (Check out the wiki History of the Calvinist-Arminian Debate if you’d like a little taste of the madness.)
Frank Schaeffer, son of the evangelical “intellectual giant” Francis Schaeffer, and father of the modern Religious Right, who is now basically a damned apostate like me, writes hilariously in his memoir Crazy for God about the infinite regress involved in simply trying to have faith “the size of a mustard seed” in order to have his prayers answered:
How exactly was this supposed to work? God was in charge, but he wouldn’t do anything for us unless we believed he would do it. But if he didn’t do anything, what reason was there to believe?
We lacked the faith to pray effectively and make God do stuff. So we prayed for the faith to make God give us faith to make him do stuff. But getting enough faith was the biggest problem, so we prayed for the faith we needed to pray for faith. But how much faith did it take to pray to have enough faith to pray for faith? And if God knew you wanted faith, why didn’t he just give it to you? It was like spending all your time calling directory information for phone numbers that you aren’t allowed to call unless you can guess the number right without asking.
Even if we did accidentally do something right, we couldn’t take credit for it. “Good things were always due to God,” Marlene Winell recalls, “and failures were always mine.” This is, interestingly enough, almost exactly the “pessimist” stance our old friend Martin Seligman discovered while doing research for a book on optimism. He found that those with a more pessimistic worldview took little or no credit for their successes, yet blamed themselves for their failures. (The optimists did the opposite, shrugging off failures as due to forces beyond their control, while taking full credit for their successes.)
So this rather insane version of Christianity breeds perfectionistic pessimists.
**
Is it any wonder I’ve been stuck? Lisa, while helping me identify my areas of learned helplessness and set some goals, asked me if I were a perfectionist. I said Hell yeah!
What reason is there to so much as move, if whatever you do is certain not to be good enough, and whatever good things that may happen aren’t up to you?
Meg Ferris, that writing and creativity coach who travels all over Europe and essentially lives the life I wish I could, cautioned me against overthinking. “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” When I realized, as a teenager, that God wasn’t going to show or tell me what to do, I still tried to make the perfect decisions every time by weighing all the pros and cons, trying to build watertight arguments for my preferred choice, and attempting to predict every eventuality (something my father still constantly hammers, in classic did-you-pack-your-long-underwear fashion)…which, I can tell you right now, is a recipe for inaction.
One of my favorite passages in Frank Schaeffer’s book is his reflection, infused with characteristic humor and humility, on what faith really means in most of our lives. Even if you believe the events he describes are completely random in a completely random universe, they nevertheless invite us to be brave and curious and take a leap of faith. We can certainly choose to let them pass us by. I for one have let too many pass me by, while I stood immobile trying to write my own Consumer Report.
The irony is that we all — secular or religious people alike — make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well. So we make a leap of faith when it comes to what we should believe in, who we will marry, and our careers. Who we happen to meet, one conversation when you were eighteen, the college course you happened to sign up for, the teacher you liked, the elevator you missed and the girl you met in the next one, decide whole lives. You would have to live a lifetime to be qualified to make any big decisions. And since we can’t do that, we trust to luck, religion, or the kindness of strangers. Only the trivialities — say, buying cars, washing machines, or airline seats — are chosen on the basis of good information. I’ve always known I like aisle seats, but what does one really want in a wife? And spiritual leaders are selected like spouses, not like airline seats. There is never a good reason, just a feeling, just that fear of death that must be overcome somehow by something — by religion, or orgasms, or art, or having children, or politics — by anything that interrupts the contemplation of oblivion.
This is the kind of faith I need, far more than I need the kind I was sold as a kid.
**
As for my parents, I’d like to send them off with a quote from Woody Allen’s classic comedy Love and Death: “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that He’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He’s an underachiever.”
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